What’s that you say? Well, that means it’s time to venture forth, to go and gaze at the future.  That’s right.  It’s time for the college visit trips.  It’s time to gaze past the high school morass and consider the horizon, scan the vistas ahead. Whoa.

Today my Hannah and I leave for the first of the few college trips.  This one is the mega trip, with the most colleges crammed carefully factored into the itinerary.  This trip has one or a few contenders, but the main goal of this trip is to create the comparison base.  After we return Thursday night, exhausted, she will have seen a wide spectrum of school features: larger, smaller, tiny, urban, suburban, Catholic, secular, pipe dream (a reach to get in), and safety (a fair bet on getting in).  The goal of this trip is inspiration and motivation and just plain info to file and compare.

We are basing, the first main part of the trip, out of my sister’s house in LA.  So, that part of the visit is just pure happy for all of us.  A great place to land when we are tired and eat and yak and decompress.  We will face many hours of driving through traffic in and out of LA every day.  But, it’s all good bonding time.  No kidding. And I’m grateful for it.

I’ve done these trips before, with my big boys.  They were exhausting but wonderful.  Now, to be able to have that time with my Hannah? Oh, I’m so grateful.  The underlying tension between the excitement of the big adventure on the horizon, college, and the frisson of disbelief that it’s so close, already, takes an emotional toll on both of us.  Plus, I’m all about the best education, per each kid’s unique style personality etc, the right fit…but at the same time I’ve been dipping heavily of late into a lot of articles on open-source learning, Gatto, Holt, and the failure of the educational system as it is.  So….is this trip gonna be a little schizophrenic for me? With my mind skipping here and there and back again….um….maybe!   So, I guess the plan is to just live in the moment. Soak it in.  Let her soak it in, all of it.  The decisions come much later.  This trip, it’s for this moment…..and a sneak peek at the horizon.  I’m excited.